If you’ve ever wondered how much time you’ve spent in meetings, email or focusing on deliverables, Delve Analytics can help. In this week’s show, Ryan Fuller explains and demonstrates how Delve Analytics provides you the insights to improve your personal productivity. How much time are you spending working after hours or where are you losing touch with key contacts? We explain how activity data is used to create personal reports of where you’re spending time. Keep watching as Ryan explains where this is going and tells the story of one 300,000 man hour meeting that was discovered and removed from the collective calendar.

Microsoft at its Connect conference on Wednesday flipped the switch on Microsoft Graph, a Office 365 Unified API and set of APIs that let developers integrate, manage and tap into vast expanses of data stored in the Office 365 cloud.

For Microsoft it’s all about unification. In the hands of developers, the graph’s unified API promises not just an endpoint for building in Office 365 and other software integrations, but a starting point for new intelligent interactions.

According to Microsoft GM of Office Extensibility Rob Lefferts, the graph represents a gateway to intelligence and insight capable of harnessing user data to solve everyday problems. From common queries like “what files do I need for this meeting,” to more complex requests dealing with user trends and customized insights, developers can tailor their app or service as they see fit without jumping through hoops.

“It would be our reimagining of what it means to be productive in a modern world,” Lefferts says, referring to solutions mobile, cross-platform and cloud-integrated solutions. “The way that people work has changed, it’s much more connected, people are more collaborative.”

Microsoft’s data pool is deep. Lefferts says some 500 petabytes of information already live in Microsoft’s cloud, with Office 365 users generating 4 trillion emails and creating 850 million meetings every month. The number of data points is bound to increase once currently siloed Office 365 information is offloaded to the graph. The company is even looking into Skype integration.

Access to rich data is the bedrock of intelligent analytics, where another prong of Microsoft Graph comes in. The Redmond software giant uses advanced machine learning algorithms fed by data and user behavior to dish out query responses in a format familiar to developers. Secure access to client activities — documents, contacts, meetings, etc. — is authorized through a single token, meaning apps don’t have to fetch multiple authorizations for different services.

Lefferts stressed the idea of an open graph, something easily accessible by coders of any ilk. To that end, Microsoft built out client libraries and SDKs for iOS, Android and .Net for the graph’s launch, with work on other platforms like Node.js, Python, Java, Ruby currently underway.

“We’ll handle the authentication, we’ll handle the common queries, we know how to interpret the responses,” he says. “The real pitch there is all about making sure that developers can start coding in five minutes.”

Prior to the graph’s public release, Microsoft collaborated with select service partners like SkyHigh Networks, Uber, Smartsheet and ZenDesk to refine its backend implementation, an exercise that resulted in interesting integrations.

For example, in a quest to make meetings more productive, Do.com pulled data from Outlook and Exchange, documents in OneDrive and other assets directly from the graph to provide deep insights into meeting planning, agenda strategy, post-meeting follow-ups and more. Everything was integrated into Outlook, ensuring users had a seamless data-driven experience.

The main thrust, Lefferts says, is to get data out of silos and into the hands of developers, who can “offer more in terms of being seamless, being smart and being effective.”

Data privacy is a hot-button topic and Microsoft is making security a high priority with the graph. The system is designed not only to protect raw data from prying eyes, but also any insights Microsoft Graph’s intelligence engine gleans from that data.

“It’s built into the business model,” Lefferts says about privacy. “There are parts of Microsoft that are driven by advertising, but Office 365 is very much organization-facing. […] And that means that we have to make sure we’re not misusing the information for anything inappropriate, we’re not sharing information with people who shouldn’t see it, whether that’s outside the organization or other people inside the organization.”

Office for iPad

Sarting today, you can download Word, Excel and PowerPoint for iPad from the App Store. The apps have the robust capabilities and familiar look and feel that is unmistakably Office, while offering a fantastic touch experience built from the ground up for iPad. With the free versions of the apps, you can read your Word documents, view your Excel data and present with PowerPoint. Your documents will look as good as they do on your PC and Mac, and better than ever on your iPad. With an Office 365 subscription, you can edit and create new documents with the iPad. When you edit a document, you can be sure that content and formatting will be maintained across Office on PC, Mac, tablet and phone. And, you always have access to your up-to-date documents in OneDrive and OneDrive for Business.

From CIO Magazine: http://www.cio.com/article/749990/Microsoft_s_Lync_Surging_as_PBX_Choice_in_North_America For more information and a free consult, please contact Henson Group at http://www.thehensongroup.com/ or 800-980-1130.

Last month, Microsoft released Power BI for Office 365, our cloud-based business intelligence service that gives people a powerful new way to work with data in the tools they use every day – Excel and Office 365. Microsoft continues to add capabilities to Power BI and today at the SharePoint Conference they are announcing the public preview of Power BI connectivity to SAP BusinessObjects BI, a joint business intelligence interoperability solution delivered with SAP in Microsoft Excel, Power BI, and SAP BusinessObjects BI. With this new solution, users can now seamlessly connect to SAP BusinessObjects BI Universes as another supported data source in Power Query for Excel, enabling them to access and analyze data across the enterprise and share their data and insights in the cloud and any device through Power BI. You can learn more during our SharePoint Conference session today at 3:45 PM-5:00 PM in the Palazzo Ballroom K, L.

Customers that have invested in both companies’ BI stacks can now extend their trusted enterprise data into familiar business tools for self-service business intelligence. Some of the capabilities enabled by the connectivity are:

Seamless access to trusted enterprise data – connect to the latest, accurate, and trusted data from an SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe including SAP BW and SAP Business Suite.

Business friendly semantics in familiar business tools – easily work with data by navigating dimensions and measures from an SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe directly in Excel.

Combining data from within and outside your organization – discover and combine SAP data with public, corporate and big data sources such as Windows Azure HDInsight.

No hassle data refresh on-premises and in the cloud – refresh your data without a manual process on-premises, even soon connecting back to on-premises data sources from the cloud with Power BI to stay up to date.

Sharing and collaborating on newfound data and insights –unlock data and insights from an SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe by sharing them across your organization with Power BI.

Try it today by visiting www.powerbi.com and downloading the Power Query Preview add-in with SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe connectivity! You can also sign-up for a free trial of Power BI for Office 365. As part of the Power BI trial you’ll also receive a free 30 day trial of Office 365 ProPlus giving you access to the latest version of Excel.

SharePoint is Microsoft’s all-purpose enterprise collaboration solution that is used primarily by enterprises to build intranets, public sites, forums, blogs and wikis, as well as for storing, searching and managing documents. SharePoint alone now generates about $2 billion in annual Microsoft revenue.

This data was captured based on a global survey of Henson Group clients in 2013. For more information and a free consult, please contact Henson Group at http://www.thehensongroup.com/ or 800-980-1130.

Jeremy Chapman is joined by scripting guy, Greg Stemp, to introduce PowerShell for managing Office 365. Jeremy and Greg explain when PowerShell makes sense compared to the user interface and describe the basics of how PowerShell works. Then Jeremy puts PowerShell to the test at NASA in Houston by attempting to add 150 users into Office 365 within the 8 minutes it took the space shuttle to reach orbit.

This week hosts Jeremy Chapman and Richard diZerega explore what’s new in the new world of apps for Office. They look at the top 5 new features including amazing content apps for PowerPoint, Excel APIs for formatting, content apps for Access, mail APIs for body and attachments and compose mail apps. Watch as Richard masterfully demonstrates all of this along the way.